On the 11th day of this new year, let us enjoy the release of Allegro 5.0.11! For those for whom it is the 12th already, you can enjoy the 12th release of the 5.0 branch (which is 5.0.11 ).

This is a pretty boring release, except for those people for whom Allegro actually stops crashing as a result of the bugs fixed in this release. Aside from the most serious bug fixes that were merged from the unstable branch, this release comes with fancier documentation (syntax highlighting!) that has been in the unstable branch for awhile now, but hasn't graced 5.0 yet. Also, for whatever reason we never distributed the PDF manual, so here it is!. If all goes well, this should be the last 5.0.x release.

I have 2 computers with ATI/AMD and it gives me kinda epileptic effect on both. I have also one nVidia card. The problem is there as well, but the flickering is so fast, its almost not noticable. When I turn off multisampling, the problem is gone.

Forgive me if I sound insincere, but what's the advantage of having the non-WIP branch? Doesn't it normally have many bugs the WIP already solved, but people are supposed to use it because... it has less bugs than a WIP version?

That ambiguity has snagged me before. With Allegro, the WIP is already best from what I remember, but say, VLC, when I tried the dev branches and they crash the second they try to load a file on my computer.

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

That said, allegro tends not to have too many nasty bugs introduced in the wip branch. Really, the WIP branch is a place where new things can be introduced, and then be broken, before stability is guaranteed. There's a reason it isn't called the unstable branch. It isn't crashy unstable, so much as work in progress.

Personally I'm in favor of jumping to allegro 6 and then making the WIP branch the only maintained one. We're already short on hands to develop the WIP branch,maintaing a "stable" branch is a lot of work that causes confusion for the Linux distro maintainers. But anyway, let's wait and see.

Allegro 6? We just got done coming out with Allegro 5 in the last few years. There's no API change that justifies bumping the major version up again. Further, the WIP version is not a substitute for the 'stable' version. The WIP version is subject to API and ABI changes where the stable version is not. Calling it Allegro 6 would be utterly confusing to the point where no one would use allegro anymore. It's bad enough people still think allegro 5 has the same api as allegro 4.

Personally I'm in favor of jumping to allegro 6 and then making the WIP branch the only maintained one. We're already short on hands to develop the WIP branch,maintaing a "stable" branch is a lot of work that causes confusion for the Linux distro maintainers. But anyway, let's wait and see.

Then there would never be a stable api to base your programs on. why would anyone decide to use allegro? the whole point of the stable branch is that it can be depended upon.

Personally, I do want to drop the stable branch and have only the 'unstable' branch. I think the way Allegro does it is atypical, and only results in a buggy stable branch without really any benefit over a more fine-grained API stability approach.

In my vision, this would involve tagging individual API entries with their stability, and then having the user opt-in into the unstable API. If they don't, then there'd be some sort of guarantee that things would keep compiling. I'm still working out the ABI details of that, if that's even possible. If you know any projects that do it this way, please tell me as I'd like to take a look.

I agree with SiegeLord here, although we have to investigate how to keep a stable API and add WIP ones at the same time in one branch. If 6.0 is too radical let's just jump to 5.2. A rose by any name...